The Most Effective Way To Stop Someone From Stealing Your Content

Aggregators that scrape content without attribution are properly named "splogs."  It's short for spam-blogs, and it's been a problem for some time.  With RSS feeds, sploggers can take your content, publish it as their own, and drive search engine traffic to their sites, so they can benefit from placing ads on their page.

Fighting splogs is tough to do on your own.  People who scrape content aren't going to respond to reasonable requests to stop - they know it's wrong, and don't care.  And as the target is usually a blogger without a lot of traffic (they don't go after big blogs because they know they'd get caught), the best way is to go to the source, the search engines.

Search engines don't like sploggers.  They take extreme measures to penalize sites that scrape content without attribution, and it's fairly easy to report abuse.

Take Google, for example.  To report someone for taking your content without your permission, simply click on this link and enter the information needed.  This generates a report with Google, who investigates the matter, and if they agree with you, they either contact the site in question, or in extreme cases, remove the offending site from the index altogether.

To be the most effective, you should have your report filled out correctly, so here's what you do.

1) Go through your sitemeter and look for searches that came to your site from a google search. Click on that link, and find out where you rank in the search result pages.  If the splogger is ranked higher than you, their site will appear above yours in the results pages.  This is what you are looking for.

2) Enter the key words, google search url, and the misbehaving site in the Google report, checking the box for duplicate site or pages.  In the comment sites, list your url with the original content, and be sure to inform Google that you have requested your site be removed, but the misbehaving site refuses to stop using your content without permission.  If you have Adsense on your page, be sure to note that the offending splogger is diverting traffic using the Google search function, which costs you and Google money.

3) Be proactive looking for search results that have your page listed below the splogger.  Each offense is another mark against the site, and by reporting it, you're "serving" the blogosphere by removing duplicate content.

4) Tell all your friends about this, to make sure that when they have their content stolen, they too can fight back without having to get lawyers involved, and without being insulted or threatened.